Ease Back Into Business with Waste Vendor Management

24 June 2020 | Posted by Cass Waste Marketing

Leaders are turning their focus to how they will effectively resume operations as they move toward re-opening in the "new-normal". Whether you are moving ahead with your full team in tact or a smaller staff it’s likely that some re-evaluation will be taking place. Finding ways to reallocate resources and keep cost down can take time you just don’t have.

Operations teams rely heavily on vendors to provide crucial products and services that we need to keep running. The value they provide can come in many forms such as lower costs, quicker delivery, improved efficiencies just to name a few. However, taking time to select the right partner, ensure financial benefit and manage the relationship can impact the efficiency and savings you set out to achieve in the first place. You rely on your vendors, but you shouldn’t have to manage them.

As business resumes, there’s an increasing need for a centralized and standardized vendor management processes. Waste and recycling management is an area that’s becoming increasingly complex, especially for multi-site organizations. Rising costs, increased pressure for sustainability, compliance reporting, varying mandates- waste can prove to be extremely challenging to navigate. Perhaps now is the time to consider waste vendor management as part of your proactive effort to help drive spend to preferred vendors, control costs, reduce risk and aid you in easing back to getting your sites optimally running.

Who & What Is Involved with Self-Managing Waste?

There is more to managing the waste your company creates than just getting it out to the curb. There are variances by industry, region, waste stream, equipment, service agreements, contracts, just to name a few. These variances and the activities involved require attention across departments and each of your sites. So not only are you paying for the pickup of your waste, you are paying your teams to manage all these activities-meanwhile those waste bills keep coming in. Below is just some of what your teams are taking time out of their day for regarding waste & recycling:

Finance Department: Bill Payment, Invoice Audit, Dispute Management

Procurement Department: Vendor Sourcing, Managing Auto-Renewals

Operations Department: Service Optimization, Equipment Issues, Risk Mitigation

By adding a waste vendor management you’ll not only free up your employee’s time, you’ll also be enlisting a strategic partner who can provide you with guidance to aid in improving overall business performance. Trying to self-manage waste versus outsourcing to a trusted partner, could be the difference between success and failure in a competitive or changing marketplace.

Benefits of Waste Vendor Management

Improved Services & Relationships: A proactive approach to identifying cost and service issues, waste experts work with hauler businesses to resolve matters and communicate progress with your teams. Improved vendor relationships result in high quality, optimized services across your portfolio.

Stay Compliant & Avoid Risk: Decrease the information gap between upper management and the ground realities of your business. Standardized processes help reduce risk on several levels and help keep you in compliance with ever changing mandates regarding waste and recycling.

Visibility & Control: Take a data-based approach with the ability to monitor and track vendor operations, waste spend, recycling performance and other key waste functions. Management teams can access historical data for each site with just a few clicks for informed business decision making.

Today’s varying waste and recycling environments combined with limited landfill space has led to added fees and rising costs. Centralized vendor management is key to providing spend visibility and cost control over the short and long term. While you may be able to secure good rates, the waste industry is facing challenges that can result in surprise fees in waste bills. Recent trends show recycling fees added to base rates that range anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent. All this varying of course by market and hauler.

Vendor Management is Mutually Beneficial 

Managing vendors effectively is a two-way street.  It’s not just about getting a good vendor and quality service. It also gives vendors the opportunity to work with educated buyers and customers. Are your locations all optimized? Do your services and equipment meet the needs of each location and your unique needs? Are service requests being made ad-hoc at the regional level or do you have a consolidated vendor team who handles all requests after validating and prioritizing them? A centralized customer support team helps eliminate unnecessary, redundant, and “nuisance” requests saves time and money as well as creating stronger vendor rapport. Centralized vendor management will allow for better insight to establish baselines and goals across your sites, so you are better prepared to have a productive relationship with your vendors. 

Build an effective vendor management strategy for managing your waste vendors and gain the insights to control risk and costs in your waste environment.

Cass Waste Expense Management has the time, talent and technology to manage your waste vendors.

  • Cass is a strategic business partner to our clients

  • Our dedicated customer support staff has extensive industry experience

  • We managed over $60 billion of our customers’ expenses in 2019

  • We process over 265,000 invoices each day

  • We managed over 125,000 units of equipment last year

  • We maintain and provide extensive waste data and analytics each market


Consult with one of our waste experts to see how Cass Waste Expense Management can help you move ahead.


 

Topics: Sourcing, Operations, Vendor Management

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